Too often Toronto’s swooning NHLers have been arriving to the opening faceoff as if half asleep. They’ve allowed the first goal in five straight games, including Wednesday’s 5-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning. They’ve dropped four regulation losses in their past five outings.

In a season in which GM Dave Nonis has complained that his players have sometimes appeared unprepared to compete, lately they look more than ready to make the three weeks and two days remaining in the regular season a nerve-racking experience for the faithful.

While the Leafs still have the luxury of a four-point cushion in the playoff race, according to the web site SportsClubStats.com, Toronto’s probability of earning a post-season berth dropped to 66.4 per cent with Wednesday’s loss. That number was sitting around 90 per cent less than seven days ago, when the Leafs put on one of their most impressive performances of the season with a 3-2 win in Los Angeles.

Considering how confident and skilled the Leafs looked on that night — considering how shaken and unsure they’ve looked at times since — the ongoing slump has underlined the utter unpredictability of a team that’s as defensively inept as it is offensively gifted. And certainly it’s also said something about the brutality of the recent schedule. The Leafs were playing the second of back-to-back games on Wednesday, this on the heels of a season-long five-game road swing.

“It’s been a gruelling stretch,” said Leafs forward Joffrey Lupul.

Still, it didn’t excuse a group of professionals, on a day they’d vowed to improve some dismal work in recent opening periods, from letting a disturbing pattern repeat itself.

Certainly Leafs goaltender James Reimer looked less than awake on Wednesday night’s first goal, on which Tampa defenceman Radko Gudas let go a benign-looking slider from the point that was also the first shot of the game. A night after Leafs coach Randy Carlyle pronounced Reimer’s work in a 3-2 loss in Detroit as “just OK”, letting in such a softie was just unacceptable — although Carlyle bizarrely defended Reimer’s work on the play, calling the goal a “fluke”.

The Leafs hung in. Phil Kessel equalized a short while later. Nikolai Kulemin scored on a top-of-the-circle redirection of a Tim Gleason point shot to make it 2-1 midway through the first period.

But once the goal-trading was in full swing, things got worse for the home team. Steven Stamkos, the Lightning captain with GTA roots, scored on one of his trademark one-knee one-timers to make it 2-2. And if the Leafs could use an obvious excuse for leaving No. 91 alone on that goal — hey, it was a Lightning power play — there was no rationalizing leaving Stamkos alone in the slot a little later on.

Dion Phaneuf simply missed the assignment that allowed Stamkos to bury another one-timer, this one to make it 3-2 before the game was 16 minutes old. And it was Lupul, among other Leafs, who blew the defensive coverage on the play that allowed Stamkos to pot a natural hat trick before the game was half over, this on a put-back of a goalmouth loose puck that was given away far too easily.

“We were coasting and we were watching,” Carlyle said of the play that made it 4-2 for the Lightning.

While Jake Gardiner’s 10th goal of the season made it 4-3 midway through the third period, a Tyler Johnson power-play goal with about seven minutes left restored Tampa’s two-goal lead. It also underlined Toronto’s status as the second-worst home penalty-killing in the league.

“We’re not sitting here saying we’re playing the type of hockey that is required to have success. Is it a trend? Well, we’ve lost three games in a row,” said Carlyle. “If we showed the desperation we displayed in the last half of the game for 60 minutes, we surely could improve our chances. That’s for sure.”

Toronto’s ongoing struggles amounted to meaningless details when stacked against a scary first-period moment that ended with Leafs defenceman Paul Ranger being removed from the ice strapped to a stretcher. Skating back in the Leafs zone to retrieve a dumped-in puck, Ranger was being chased by Lightning centre Alex Killorn. Moments later, Killorn was being assessed a five-minute boarding major and a game misconduct for driving Ranger headfirst into the glass.

If it was a dirty play — Carlyle, acknowledging he’d only had a cursory look at the replay, called it “textbook hitting from behind” — it was also a complicated one. As Ranger retreated he appeared to look up at the clock, and then back at Killorn, all the while overskating the slowing puck. At a late moment, Ranger changed direction, turning back toward the puck and into Killorn, who slammed Ranger into the Bay St. end boards.

There was a brief scrum wherein Ranger’s defence partner Gleason registered his unhappiness with Killorn’s choice. But all the while Ranger lay motionless, face down on the ice behind the goal-line. Though there were 4.1 seconds remaining in the opening frame, the officials soon sent the players and coaches to their dressing rooms.

Still, some players, a dozen or more Leafs and a handful from Tampa, where Ranger once played, stuck around as Ranger was attended to by a phalanx of medical personnel. At a couple of points Ranger appeared to move his legs. Finally, after about 15 minutes, with Ranger’s neck in a brace and his eyes open, he was wheeled toward the arena’s loading dock and a waiting ambulance.

The club later announced Ranger had been taken for a “precautionary assessment” to hospital, where he was stable, conscious and alert — in other words, mercifully and hopefully in better condition than his team’s defensive acumen.

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